The Noise in His Head
by GroupFour
Summary: Quinn tries to figure out why Carrie's obsessive side starts acting up over a file.


[This has no logical place pretty much anywhere on the show's timeline, so just pretend it's floating in nonsensical limbo.]

* * *

He usually ends up being the last one to leave the building at the end of the day. Not because there's a lot for him to do or because someone ordered him to stay late, but because Quinn likes the feeling of complete calm and desolation that the empty building offers. It helps clear his head when he gets to be the last one who turns off the lights.

On a particular Saturday, their department takes a bit longer to quiet down and empty, and by the time he gets ready to leave, Quinn realizes it's past 10 PM. Oddly enough, the thought that half his weekend is already over doesn't upset him, which, on its own, is worrisome. Because it means he has nothing to look forward to outside the workplace, nothing to clutch onto if the shit would ever hit the fan and he lost his job. But he pushes these thoughts, locking them away, because avoiding these kind of depressing musings is exactly why he stays after work hours.

He shoulders his bag and heads towards the exit. On his way out he spots a line of light peering from under the door to the Archives. He stops and looks around but, as expected, the building rings empty. There shouldn't be anyone else around but him. He gives the door a cautious push.

A giant mess of papers, binders, and files appears. And sitting on the floor in the middle of this chaos is Carrie.

"Shit" she says, looking startled for a second, "you scared me."

He frowns. "What's going on?"

"Will you get in here and shut the door already?"

"There's no one else in the building."

"I'm not taking any chances."

He complies and closes the door behind him. "How did you even manage to get in here?"

"Keys. Archive guy owes me a big favor."

Curiosity instantly hits him. "Why?"

Carrie looks at him like he's an idiot. "I'm digging through the archives on a late Saturday and _that's _your question?"

"It's one of many, yeah."

"Saul and I had an argument today."

Another frown. "That's why the archive guy owes you a favor?"

"Forget the fucking archive guy" she says, slapping a few files down, "Saul mentioned that, before I was hired, some of the people that no longer work here did all kind of digging and background searches on me."

"That's usually the procedure, we all get background searches on us."

"For three weeks?"

He frowns. "If that's what Saul told you, then he's lying."

"That's what I thought."

"But why would he?"

"I don't know, to piss me off?"

Quinn takes a look around the mountain of papers littering the floor. "Carrie, there's no way you'll find your file in this mess."

"It's not a mess, I have a system."

He fails to see any sort of system, but then again their minds tend to work in vastly different ways. "Well you're going to need a lot of help getting through all this either way."

She considers his words for a second before shaking her head. "I'll be fine on my own."

"Carrie, there's no way you'll find it by yourself."

"I'll handle it, all right? Just please go."

"If you're scared that I'll read your file, then-"

"I'm not scared, I've got nothing to hide."

Right. That's why she's elbow-deep in papers at 10 PM on a Saturday.

"Then you wouldn't mind me helping you look."

She arches an eyebrow. "Are you scared that I'll read _your _file?"

He shrugs as if to say 'knock yourself out'. "If you find it, I won't stop you from looking through it."

She knows that they're both bullshitting each other. But they say nothing because that's how it usually works with everyone within the CIA. Quinn settles next to her and starts picking up files and arranging them methodically.

"You're not going to tell anyone I broke in here, are you?" Carrie says, a hint of worry in her voice.

"No."

He waits for her to ask him why, but the question never comes. He wonders if it's because she wouldn't believe him, or maybe because she wouldn't like the answer.

A few minutes later she glances at him out of the corner of her eye. "So why are you hanging around here so late?"

"I didn't really want to go home."

Once again, she doesn't ask why. Then again, Carrie doesn't usually question why life in the CIA made a lot of people miserable. And the thought depresses him a greater deal than he thought it would.

They spend a long time wordlessly digging through the boxes of files. And every so often he glances at her, wondering exactly what could be running through her head. If her file has something secretive in it, then she wouldn't have agreed for him to stay and search with her. Which only means she must have skipped a day of taking her meds and she isn't thinking straight.

Or maybe, just maybe, she trusts him enough not to disclose whatever it is they'll find.

No, it has to be her paranoia acting up.

His hands suddenly stop shuffling through the files when his eye catches something. And the sudden silence from him doesn't go undetected by Carrie.

"Did you find it?" she asks.

"No. But I found our psych evaluations from the past few years."

A hint of dread washes over her. "And?"

"You passed with flying colors. Every single one."

She scoots over and peers at the file. "Huh. I figured I did good, but not this good."

"You managed to fool them every time. You think Saul bribed them?"

"No, these date back to before he even know that I was bipolar."

Quinn looks at her with newfound admiration. "How do you do it? How do you fool trained professionals?"

She shrugs like it's no big deal. "Normal people suppress a lot of emotions, so I act like I'm bored whenever they do the evaluation."

He wonders if that's how she sees everyone around her. A bunch of people who don't act the way they feel. No matter how much it bothers him, the statement does ring rather true.

"So let's take a look at how _you _fooled them" she asks, snatching the rest of the papers from his hands.

He doesn't like the implication, but decides to play along. "It helps that I'm not bipolar."

"Sure, but you're not like _them _either." She speaks as if the rest of the people in the building are the odd ones.

"Maybe I really am just like everyone else. Or maybe we have a shitty psychiatrist."

There's another option, of course. That he's just as good as she is at pretending to be someone else.

Carrie frowns when she finds a file with his name on it. She opens it up and starts reading. "This one says that you're depressed."

"So I was right. Shitty psychiatrist."

"No, hang on, this guy could be onto something."

"I'm not depressed."

"Maybe not, but you're still..." she thinks for a moment, failing to find the right words, "I don't know, emotionally constipated."

Quinn wants to roll his eyes at her. "Is that your professional opinion, doctor?"

"I know you're aware of it. Just like how I'm aware that I fly off the handle and I come off too strongly sometimes."

"So the fact that I act like a polite human being means I'm emotionally withdrawn."

"You're not just polite, you're like the fucking star student around here. You always do what you're told without questioning it, and you never overstep your boundaries. And sometimes that scratches my fucking brain."

"Sounds to me like you're a little envious."

Mistake.

Carrie turns her head slowly and gives him an impressively icy glare. And he braces himself to show up the next day at work with a black eye.

"I'm envious" she says, in disbelief "of you."

Quinn's gut reaction is to apologize, but he realizes that, in any other circumstance he wouldn't do it. So what exactly is it about her that makes him want to fold so easily? "If you can call me emotionally constipated, I can call you envious."

"And I'll add another one to your list, which is deluded."

"Not according to the great psychiatric board of the United States."

"Just keep looking for the file" she says, returning to her spot in the middle of the papers. Quinn notices that, during the hour they've been in the room together, her side doesn't look like it's cleared one bit. It's still all chaos without any system to speak of. Or maybe he's just not seeing it.

He returns to his side of the papers, which are stacked neatly along the wall.

So she thinks he's withdrawn and always follows the rules. He's not sure why the thought is still circling his mind space, because he's never cared what other people think about him. But her words keep echoing in his head incessantly, and it's slowly driving him mad.

Midnight comes and goes, leaving them with not much progress made. And as frustration and fatigue settles in, they both become less and less motivated to keep looking. 2 AM finds Quinn slumped against a wall and bouncing a rolled up piece of paper on the door.

"We're never going to find that fucking file, are we?" Carrie says, who somehow ended up lying on a pile of papers.

The paper bedding she's on looks oddly comfortable and he can't lie that a few idle thoughts aren't buzzing around his head. But he pushes them away, because it's just the late hour sneaking thoughts in his head and making them sound like a good idea. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes.

"You can't smoke in here" she says matter-of-factly.

"I know."

He doesn't really feel the need to smoke, but wants to prove to her that he isn't such a stickler for following the rules.

Carrie just shrugs and holds out her hand. He throws her the pack. And the second he does, Quinn realizes one of the reasons he couldn't ever follow one of those idle thoughts. Because they'd both feed their respective self destructive tendencies until there would be nothing left.

A few moments after she lights her own cigarette, a thin curtain of smoke covers the room, and it drifts towards the ceiling. The sight takes him back to his years of college, except this time he's not trying to impress the girl that's in the room. That possibility disappeared the second he was forced to shoot her. And maybe that's it. That's why he's always so careful around her and cares what she thinks. He feels guilty.

"Do you ever think about dying?" Carrie asks out of the blue.

He's not sure what brought it up. Or if there's a right answer for her question. "Sometimes."

"I do it all the time. It keeps me up at night."

"When I was shot I expected to see my whole life flash in front of my eyes. But it didn't. I just became desperate to live one more day, just one more day so I could do all the things I've been putting off."

"Like what?"

Quinn picks something at random from his mental list. "Tell my father I was the one who crashed his car when I was a kid."

"I have a feeling he already knows. Teenagers are always reckless."

"I was eleven."

Carrie lets out a little smile, and the sight is so foreign on her face that it almost startles him. "What else would you do?"

"I don't know. Visit my mother's grave more often." A pause. "Tell you that I'm sorry."

"For what?"

He vaguely gestures towards her. "Your shoulder."

She's visibly bothered by the reminder that he shot her, but she shakes it off. "It's okay."

"At the time I thought it was the only thing to do, but I guess I could've just disobeyed the order. I've done it before."

Carrie raises her head in sudden interest. "_You _disobeyed orders?"

"Sometimes I'm not okay with the target I'm supposed to take out."

"For instance?"

Quinn considers just flat-out telling her, but he's not sure she'd appreciate what he did, even if it was for her sake. No matter how you spin it, he was still just a trigger-pull away from shooting the man she loved. Right in front of her. "No one you know."

"Like you'd tell me if it was."

Sometimes he forgets how perceptive she is.

"You should smile more often" he says, reminded of her earlier, almost imperceptible, grin.

"I need a reason first."

And there are those 2 AM thoughts again, swarming like annoying little bees. He tries to chase them away by staring at the ceiling and keeping his eyes on the smoke. But it's not working.

"I think I'm going to call it a night" Quinn says, rising from the floor.

"You're leaving me by myself with all this mess?"

"You should just cut your losses and go home, Carrie. Forget the file."

She shakes her head stubborly. "I need to see it."

A part of him is impressed by her determination. It would be so easy to sit back down next to her and stop resisting the thoughts in his head, just join her on this mad search that leads nowhere sane.

He walks towards the door instead. "Goodnight, Carrie."

And he's gone.

The next day isn't a working one, so there's little point for him to go home and try to get some sleep. He ends up sitting at a bar and staring down a glass for a few hours. And even though it takes a while, he finally manages to silence the noise in his head.

But just a few minutes later, it rushes right back when the seat next to him is occupied.

He doesn't even have to look to know who it is. "Did you find it?"

"No." Carrie pushes the pack of cigarettes in front of him. "You forgot this."

It makes little sense for her to be here just because she wanted to return the pack, so he patiently waits for the real reason to surface.

"I found your file" she says moments later.

"And?"

"It's just one page."

Quinn nods, not surprised in the least.

She says nothing else for a while, content to simply order a drink and stare absentmindedly into it, much like how he's doing. And he's tempted to ask her to go away because her simple presence is distracting. But at the same time he wants to be distracted.

"So what's it like?" Carrie asks. "Living like a shadow. Knowing your real identity basically doesn't exist."

He doesn't really have an answer for her, but tries to come up with something. "I don't think about it too much. I just try to do the right thing."

"I don't think I could do it. Lose myself in the job like that."

He wants to laugh, because she doesn't seem to realize just how lost in the job she already is. Maybe even more than him.

When her next few drinks come, she wordlessly slides one in front of him. Just another reminder of how bad an influence they are for each other. He's always tried to follow the rules and keep his distance, but she's quickly making this pattern hard to follow.

And as he glances at her from the corner of his eyes, Quinn wonders if maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to make one exception. Just this one time.


End file.
